Loomio
Sat 11 Mar 2017 8:14PM

NOTA (none-of-the-above)

AW Aaron Wolf Public Seen by 9

I like the idea. It amounts to rejection of the whole pool of candidates.

In IRV, if exhausted ballots add up to the majority (and people understand this so they can choose to not rank candidates they disapprove of), the election is canceled.

In SRV, perhaps it would be that to reach the runoff, a candidate must have a majority of ballots giving them a non-zero score.

If a voter abstains from a race entirely, they wouldn't count toward what constitutes a majority, so there needs to be a way to explicitly vote NOTA in IRV (score some 0s in SRV works).

What happens if NOTA wins?

Discuss…

SW

Sara Wolf Wed 15 Mar 2017 10:29PM

On my strategic timeline None Of The Above comes in after we have a handful of SRV elections under our belts. One thing at a time. This probably comes in after an ideal system is worked out and passed for multi winner too..

I don't get why you'd need or want a None Of The Others option. Seems like the scoring already takes care of that. If some candidates are okay you just give the rejects zeros

CS

Clay Shentrup Thu 16 Mar 2017 7:21AM

In practical terms I don't see what NOTA really gives you. If you hold another election, why would people run in it who didn't think it was worthwhile in the first place? Do you really expect that you're going to get some dramatically better options?

If you just use a good system that's inviting to a variety of candidates, then you're in a much better place than now. From that position, I don't see how the upgrade to NOTA gives much improvement.